IATP is pleased to announce the third annual offering of the Certified Expert Trauma Professional (CETP) course beginning September 8, 2015. This challenging course, 24-week inter-active online, furthers your training and creden-tialing beyond the Certified Clinical Trauma Professional. In the CCTP course you learned about what makes trauma treatment effective; the CETP course teaches and coaches implementation of these skills into your practice. Past students have said that this course has transformed their practice and given them confidence and competence working with survivors of trauma that they never had.

The course material is offered in weekly (Sunday evenings) live interactive video-conferencing capsules by our senior faculty. The course material is organized around implementing the IATP 4-Stage Structure into your practice for better man-agement of the treatment trajectory with survivors of trauma. These capsules are recorded and posted for future viewing for those unable to attend the Sunday night live presentation. The course bal-ances these interactive learning experiences with nine (9) live 90-minute live video-conferencing Skills Coaching groups facilitated by one of our senior faculty and one proctor. We are excited and more than a little proud to offer a richly interactive course of this depth in an entirely distance learning format--no traveling required.

For those of you wanting to take your trauma skills to the next level, this course and certification is definitely for you! N.B. Class size is limited, so register early.

In addition, our core trainings are being offered again starting on September 20 for 6 weeks:

This study assesses the educational preparation and training for master's counseling students regarding indirect trauma in both CACREP and non-CACREP counseling programs.

The Impact of Gambling Addiction, by Damon Dye, EdD, LMHC, BACC

This mixed methods study evaluates a wide range of symptoms within problem gamblers that are consistent with traumatic stress that are scarcely identified and rarely treated, as well as spousal symptoms, current spousal interventions, and clinical barriers to spousal symptom treatment.

Practice and Ehics: Two Sides of the Same Coin, by Jay S. Sweifach, DSW, LCSW, and Norman Linzer, Ph.D.

This study uses focus groups of social workers to explore the interplay between evidence-based practice and ethics amid the immediacy and uncertainty of crisis and trauma. A specific focus of the paper is placed on the contextual influence that evidence-based practice has on ethical decision-making.

Progressive Counting: The Next Trauma Treat-ment of Choice?,
by Ricky Greenwald, Psy. D.

An overview of a method combining EMDR and the Counting method.

Battling with Shadows: The Implicit Trauma of Adoption, by Robert Hafetz, M.S.

An overview of the trauma incurred through children who have been separated from their mother and case history examples.

A young woman came for her appointment quite a few years ago. She complained of insomnia, flashbacks, dissociative episodes, and nightmares. She held a responsible position, and her symptoms were affecting her work performance.

We discussed her former therapy experience. She had seen another therapist, who had employed cognitive behavioral therapy, but she had seen no cessation of her symptoms. Her husband had insisted she see another therapist. By the time she recounted her symptoms, she was crying - we had not even gotten to the details of her trauma.

I wanted to tread lightly with this client, and I wanted to develop a rapport with her. Her trust of therapists hung in the balance. I explained to her that each individual is unique, and I pointed to my collection of all things zebra-ish - figurines, pillows, stuffed animals, pictures, etc. - that are present in my office. I told her that no two zebras have the same stripe pattern, just as no two humans have the same fingerprints. She seemed calmer as we talked about things unrelated to her symptoms. I said I tailor my therapy to each unique client, refusing to use a "cookbook" method. Building trust was my goal with her at first.

We briefly discussed her employment duties, her children, and her goals in life. She was quite articulate about wanting to be a better employee, feel rested, and get rid of the insomnia, flashbacks, and nightmares. Her understanding of her dissociative episodes was lacking, so we talked briefly about how our body seeks to "escape" the trauma.

By now she was able to begin her description of the event that had caused the symptoms some years ago. Her mother had been murdered, her body dismembered, and some of the pieces left where the client could find them. When she tried to sleep, she visualized the pieces, and she had flashbacks of her trauma at finding them. When she did sleep, she was awakened several times during the night by nightmares of what might have happened to her mother before she was killed. At work, she found herself unable to concentrate or perform her clerical duties because of the dissociative episodes. The symptoms were becoming worse - she was tired most of the time from lack of restful sleep, and her job performance was not up to her employer's standards. Her husband wanted to help her, but he did not know what to do except to get her to another therapist -- me.

BIRRT is a technique designed to decrease or eliminate the symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The original IRRT (Imagery Rescripting and Reprocessing Therapy) was created by Mervin Smucker, Ph.D from the Medical College of Wisconsin. I have reduced the process to its essentials and call it Brief IRRT or BIRRT. With BIRRT, there is good news and bad news.

The Good News

The technique is brief to administer. It generally is done in one two-hour session per traumatic incident. That's right, ONE two-hour session. Of the times that I have used BIRRT (over 400), only a handful of individuals have not had significant benefit or required more time than one two-hour session for any specific traumatic event.

BIRRT is very effective. A pre- and post-BIRRT self-assessment is done using a 30-item PTSD symptom list which has a 0-5 scale of severity (0=doesn't apply and 5=applies a lot). The average baseline for non-traumatized subjects is 1.1. The average pre-BIRRT is 3.8. In my follow up surveys (after days, months and years) I have found that nearly all clients who have completed the homework after the session continue to enjoy relief from most, if not all, of their PTSD symptoms and report a post-BIRRT average of 0.9!

Trauma has a way of welding together the emotions of the event (what was felt) and the details of the event (what happened). So each time something triggers a memory of an event the emotions must be experienced with it! BIRRT effectively breaks that trauma weld and the traumatic emotions are released, never more to be attached to the details of that event.

59th Annual Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine

The 59th Annual Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Automotive Medicine will discuss research in multidisciplinary approaches to automotive-related trauma in areas such as epidemiology, biomechanics, treatment and management, transport, psychology, accidentology, and human factors. Review injuries and injury mechanisms, human tolerance as related to vehicular injury, restraint systems effects, crashworthiness and risk analysis. The goal is to more effectively treat and prevent injuries stemming from an automotive environment.